2late2be is referring to the fact that your sense of taste is heavily influenced by your sense of smell.

We actually did this in high school; we ate an orange while smelling lavender.

Basically no, we didn’t end up with a taste of lavender, but we did end up not being able to taste the orange particularly well.

While your sense of smell doesn’t dictate your sense of taste, it does heavily support it. Hence, people who lose their sense of smell in one way or another often report that they cannot distinguish taste quite as well as they used to.

It’s true that those two senses are closely connected. My maternal grandmother had virtually no sense of taste. She used to try and give me milk that had obviously turned. It smelled rancid but she couldn’t tell. She would then drink a sip to show that it was fine and then expect me to drink it. Of course it was awful but she couldn’t tell. It would have to come out in clumps before she would toss it.
Also, I used to have this prescribed medicated balm that I would put on my dry, cracked elbows. It was so pungent that I could actually taste it. I was a strange sensation.